Feeling 'Peabody' spirit

Daughter of TV cartoon's creator likes film adaptation

By Pam Grady

Published 1:16 pm, Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Tiffany Ward was astonished when she saw the penthouse apartment occupied by the erudite genius dog Mr. Peabody and his adopted human son, Sherman, in "Mr. Peabody & Sherman," the new 3-D, big-screen adaptation of her father Jay Ward's beloved cartoon. The building resembles the Seagram Building, her father's favorite Manhattan skyscraper. The residence itself, down to the midcentury furniture and the art on the walls, reminded her of a beach house her dad built for the family in the Orange County coastal enclave of Corona Del Mar in the mid-1960s.

There is no way director Rob Minkoff, production designer David James or anyone at DreamWorks Animation could have known either of those things, and yet somehow they managed to capture the essence of not just the cartoon but of Jay Ward himself. For his daughter, it was just further proof that the faith she put in Minkoff and executive producer Jason Clark when they first pitched the movie over a decade ago was not misplaced.

"We had lunch and you could tell they were major fans," Tiffany Ward remembers during a recent visit to the Bay Area. "It was almost an instant meeting of the minds. I could tell they really had the passion. They pitched a story that was different, but it was certainly time travel and the characters. It took a long time to flesh out the story we have now. They were 4 1/2-minute episodes, so to take it to a 90-minute movie — it sounds easy, but it's not."

Mr. Peabody and Sherman were introduced in 1959, their series "Peabody's Improbable History" alternating with "Fractured Fairy Tales," "Dudley Do-Right" and other cartoons and sandwiched between "Rocky & Bullwinkle" episodes. The dog and his boy, with their trusty WABAC machine, roamed through time, visiting important events in history.

For Baby Boomers watching it in its first run and the Gen-Xers who followed catching it in reruns, the show provided a clinic in pun-laced humor and offered small children their first brush with history, something Minkoff — born in 1962 — remembers vividly.

"Whether it was intentional or not, it introduced kids to the idea of history," he says. "It seemed like a really interesting idea, this whole notion that something happened and it was a story and it was important and somebody was important in the story and they did something that was notable and remarkable and we should know about it.

More Information

At a glance:

"Mr. Peabody & Sherman"

Starring: Ty Burrell, Max Charles, Stephen Colbert

Director: Rob Minkoff

Opens Friday

"History was my favorite subject, probably in some measure due to the show, because I was already kind of engaged, 'This is, like, a fun subject,'" he adds. "Then the idea that it was always kind of kooky and wacky — I don't think there was ever a moment where I misinterpreted the kookiness of it. I always understood it to be what it was. They were twisting. They took the story — probably because it was animation and you understand that it's a fantasy, it's not trying to be literal."

Jay Ward was from Berkeley and attended Cal, working his way through school by working the line at a Coca-Cola bottling plant. After serving in World War II and furthering his education at Harvard Business School, he returned to the Bay Area. With his childhood friend Alex Anderson, they created "Crusader Rabbit," the first cartoon made expressly for television, which premiered in 1949. After losing the rights to the series, Ward returned to selling real estate and other entrepreneurial ventures in Berkeley, but he wanted to get back into animation, eventually partnering with Bill Scott on "Rocky and His Friends."

"My dad wasn't an artist," Tiffany Ward says. "He was the equivalent to the ringleader in a circus. He was the focal point. He hired everybody. He did every recording session. He wrote the pilots with Bill Scott. He cast the voices. He oversaw the story. He oversaw everything, but at the end of the day, he didn't do much of the writing, because he was too busy and he didn't do any of the artwork, but he knew what he wanted.

"The whole studio was Jay-rated. At one point, the artists and writers had a stamp made that said, 'Jay-rated,' because he was notorious. They would come and pitch him a script and he'd laugh all the way through, then he'd say, 'OK, now you have to go back and make it funnier.'"

Jay Ward died in 1989, so Minkoff will never know if "Mr. Peabody & Sherman" is Jay-rated, but he had other tough constituencies to consider in those who remember "Peabody's Improbable History"; a new generation that doesn't know the show at all; and in Tiffany Ward, the keeper of Jay Ward's legacy. Finding a story that might please and entertain them all was a challenge. There were several writers and several versions of the tale before screenwriter Craig Wright arrived at a final version, one that concentrates as much on the relationship between dog and boy as it does on their time-traveling adventures to the French Revolution, the Italian Renaissance and other points in history.

"We had the two things kind of going in parallel, which is the fun of going into history and meeting historical figures and doing all that while this other more personal story is going on," Minkoff says.

"We knew that there were going to be a core group of people who remember the show from when they were kids and there's going to be a lot of people who've never seen it before. So what did we want the tone to be? You could really push it in a lot of different directions. You could make it super-meta, you could make it super-aware of what it is, but, again, that's going to push it more toward the people that know it and kind of can be in on it. But we said, 'This has to be for everyone.' So that was important to us."